Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary who became a model over night and whose controversial photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday, December 11. She was 85.

Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, said her agent, Mark Roesler. He said he and Page's family agreed to remove life support. Before the heart attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.

Page's trademark jet-black bangs and curvy figure—clad in slinky lingerie, bondage gear or other thematic costumes, if clad in anything at all—were fixtures on the pages of men's magazines from 1951 to 1957. Hugh Hefner himself picked her to be Playboy's Playmate of the Month in January 1955.

She stopped modeling in 1957 and moreover mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades, during which time she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.

Bettie Mae Page was born on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, one of six children. She and two sisters were sent to an orphanage after her father went to jail and her mother could not cope on her own. Page later described her father as "a sex fiend" who started sexually molesting her when she was 13.

Page, armed with an arts degree with Peabody College in Nashville, did her first modeling work in the 1940s after moving to San Francisco with the first of her three husbands. After they divorced in 1947, she pursued modeling in New York. Photos from a shoot with Miami photographer Bunny Yeager ended up in the pages of Playboy.

"Bettie Page embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface," authors Karen Essex and James L. Swanson wrote in their 1996 book "Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend."